If you’re a big enough star, leaked songs can have a pretty devastating effect on your music promo. Everyone from Dua Lipa to Ariana Grande has been burned before, with SZA saying last year, “When people leak my songs, they ruin them. From then on they are no longer mine.”
And, in classic catch-22 style, the bigger the star, the more people are around them when they’re making new music ― and the more opportunities there are for leaks.
Take Taylor Swift. Her Eras tour last year involved 50 truck drivers alone ― so how does a star like her avoid leaks?
Well, according to a behind-the-scenes interview from the End Game video, Taylor revealed a genius way of keeping her songs under wraps until release.
In 2018, the singer said of the dancers in the video, “I commend [them] fully because um...they’ve been pretending like there’s music playing when there’s not.”
She then revealed that she’d been wearing in-ear monitors throughout the video which had been playing her song back to her. But the dancers had been listening to something completely different.
“They’ve been dancing to a click track. It’s incredibly hard work,” the Shake It Off singer revealed.
We’ve written about click tracks before ― they’re essentially a metronome that keeps the musicians and singers in time. And in the video, Taylor seemed to keep everyone in time using a cowbell.
Huh!
Yup! She also revealed in the video that she wouldn’t even send the music to Ed Sheeran ahead of releasing the song, even though it was a collab.
“She wouldn’t ever send new songs, no. I hear them but it has to be with her. I remember when I did a song with her for her album, I was in San Francisco and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it and they flew to San Francisco, and they played me the song I’ve done with her. And they were like, ‘Do you like it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And then they took it back. That’s how you hear them,” Ed revealed when speaking to Capricho in 2017.
Taylor had also blasted heavy metal music from her home while hosting a small listening party for 20 fans ahead of the release of 1989.
“I have a lot of maybe-/maybe-not-irrational fears of security invasion, wiretaps, people eavesdropping,” Taylor told Kimmy Kimmel in the past.
Taylor’s albums have leaked before, so we get the worry. Still ― what I wouldn’t do for one of those iPads...